HORST BUCHHOLZ: Theater

Al Hirschfeld's 1959 cartoon of HB with Kim Stanley in "Chéri"

One article that I've been dying to write in the Horst Buchholz series is one about his theatre work, because, I think, his critical success on the stage really overturns all the poison that was ever written about him by critics on the back of his film and TV work.

The fact is that HB began his career on the stage and, while he didn't quite end it there, he was often more successful as a stage actor than he came to be in front of the cameras. The tragedy here is that you really did have to be there to see it, none of it was captured for posterity, except for fragments of silent family movie footage and the little glimmers from critics who did appreciate his talents. Here are just a few highlights.

HB's first acting job of all came in April 1947, at 13, in a production of Erich Kästner's classic children's play Emil and the Detectives. It was a very small role but it began his association with the theatre and, after he'd worked his passage as backstage gopher and scene-shifter, he began starring in bigger and bigger roles as he reached the end of his teens. He had several stints in Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, and Richard III, playing Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, in the latter production.

In 1953, HB starred as Peter Pan in an exuberant performance in West Berlin, but shortly before this came a role which many actors who've filled it would describe as extremely challenging. The Playboy of the Western World, by Irish playwright John Synge, was first performed in Dublin in 1907 and, immediately, sparked a series of riots over its portrayal of rural Irish folk. They were infamous enough incidents to be known today as "The Playboy Riots", although the play is now compulsory reading for anyone taking the Leaving Certificate or Ardteist in Irish schools, their equivalent of the British GCSE. Part of the controversy centres on the use of thick Irish vernacular, such as this lengthy passage which Christy Mahon, the main character, delivers at the top of Act 2:-

[Counting jugs on a dresser.] Half a hundred beyond. Ten there. A score that's above. Eighty jugs. Six cups and a broken one. Two plates. A power of glasses. Bottles, a school-master'd be hard set to count, and enough in them, I'm thinking, to drunken all the wealth and wisdom of the County Clare. [He puts down the boot carefully.] There's her boots now, nice and decent for her evening use, and isn't it grand brushes she has? [He puts the brushes down and goes by degrees to the looking-glass.] Well, this'd be a fine place to be my whole life talking out with swearing Christians, in place of my old dogs and cat, and I stalking around, smoking my pipe and drinking my fill, and never a day's work but drawing a cork an odd time, or wiping a glass, or rinsing out a shiny tumbler for a decent man. [He takes the looking-glass from the wall and puts it on the back of a chair; then sits down in front of it and begins washing his face.] Didn't I know rightly I was handsome, though it was the divil's own mirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel's brow; and I'll be growing fine from this day, the way I'll have a soft lovely skin on me and won't be the like of the clumsy young fellows do be ploughing all times in the earth and dung.

The delivery is meant to be fast and furious and how HB would have projected this in German translation is anyone's guess. But, just take a look at the actors who've filled this role down the years: Cyril Cusack, some say the greatest Irish actor ever, made the Christy role his own on the Dublin stages in the 30's and 40's, Burgess Meredith ("The Penguin" in Batman, inter alia) on Broadway in the late 40's, John Hurt (The Naked Civil Servant etc.) on TV in the 70's and Cillian Murphy (The Wind That Shakes The Barley) more recently on stage back in Dublin. One detail, though, is this: they were all anywhere between their late twenties and early forties. HB was 19. Talk about going in at the deep end! It also explains a lot about HB's general style of acting later on.

Before he graduated into movie making, HB tackled a handful of other foreign dramatists' work which gave him exposure to one of the aspects which became a tradmark of his, namely his mastery of foreign languages. During the early to mid 1950's, he would star in plays by France's Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Spain's Antonio Buero Vallejo, in a 1954 production of The Glowing Darkness, in which he plays a rebellious young man who loses his sight and who disrupts life at the residential home to which he is sent. This was the "German James Dean" before anyone knew who the American one was!

HB took a break from the stage in 1955 as his movie career got underway, but his first work in America was on the stage, in late 1959, when he starred in Chéri, on Broadway, with Kim Stanley. The play was based on novels by French novelist Colette - of Gigi fame - about a rich Parisian courtesan who takes on the 19-year-old son of a friend and then tries to mould the angry, spoilt young man in to suitable husband material to hand on to some lucky young lady, only for him to fall fatally in love with her. It was a clumsy production with a script widely received as dodgy, but Kim and HB at least got the credit for doing their best with it in the freezing cold, ramshackle Moresco Theatre (which bit the dust in 1982). HB got his fair share of the accolades, perhaps none more glowing than that of Charlie Chaplin's ex-wife, actress, Paulette Goddard. "He takes sex off the analyst's couch," she told the New York Times, "and puts it back in the boudoir."

HB was, of course, in America in order to help Billy Wilder and his chums rescue Hollywood from the aftermath of its first actors' strike and from the onslaught of television. What happened there is another debate entirely but HB delivered another stint on Broadway in January-February 1963 in a Max Frisch play called Andorra. Set in a microcosmic society full of violent political factions, HB plays a young man who is mistakenly thought to be Jewish and becomes the target of anti-Semitic mobs from outside his home town. He was starring opposite Hugh Griffith as his adoptive father, shortly to win an Oscar for Tom Jones, and Clifton James, later to become gum-chewing Sherriff J.W. Pepper in two Bond films. The show closed after just nine performances, but not before this piece appeared from Michael Smith in Village Voice, a popular New York magazine, on 14th February 1963:-

“Horst Buchholz... gives a performance full of grace, charm, wit and intelligence, which in terms of the text makes complete sense.”

Film and, eventually, television, came to dominate HB's work during the 1960's and 1970's, as well as his own two abortive attempts to become a director. In 1977, though, he returned to the stage in Zurich, Switzerland, with a blast in a German translation of British writer Peter Nichols' play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. It's a savage black comedy about a dog-eared schoolteacher who struggles to keep order in the classroom by day and who battles to uphold his sanity by night at home, where he has to cope with a weapons-grade optimist of a wife and oodles of interfering relatives, while caring for a severely disabled daughter.

The play starts with the teacher's monologue, delivered alone on stage but sparking off the audience, who are meant to be his "class":-

"That's enough! (Pause. Almost at once, louder) I said enough! (Pause. Stares at audience.) Another word and you'll all be here till five o'clock. Nothing to me, is it?"

Not to rehearse the whole thing here, but on this goes for a solid five minutes, bringing back your worst memories of the pissed-off teacher from hell, with his scruffy cardigan and tie hung half way down his chest, taking his revenge on you lot flicking your little globs of chewed up paper with the end of your ruler past his head AND THERE'S STILL SOMEBODY TALKING NOW!!!!!!

Michael Early and Philippa Keil, summarising Egg in their 1993 book The Modern Monologue: Men, Volume 2, say this about the role:

"Before long he has the whole audience in a 'Simple Simon' hands-on-head routine... This speech demands acting that is daring, threatening and entertaining."

Now, have a look at some of the other actors who have played "Bri": Albert Finney played him in the West End and on Broadway in the late sixties, and was nominated for a Tony; Alan Bates in the 1970 film version; Kevin Kline was in the role on Broadway almost simultaneously with HB over in Zurich in '77. Eddie Izzard has since played in the role, one version being televised by the BBC, as has Clive Owen (Children of Men).

Now... let them tell you that HB couldn't act...

Egg in Zurich was a sell-out, and so was Cabaret, in which HB appeared at the Theater des Westens in West Berlin in the New Year 1978-1979. He played Emcee, the role filled by Joel Grey in the 1972 film and now being performed by Wayne Sleep on a UK Tour. This is the only part of HB's stage work which exists on film, thanks to the Super 8 footage shot by his wife, Myriam Bru, when she was allowed to film the dress rehearsals from the "one and nines". Part of that footage was used in Christopher Buchholz's film Horst Buchholz... mein Papa.

In the 1980's, in and around his film and TV work, HB diversified back to the stage more and more. He toured in West Germany in a play called A Better Man in 1981, and twice in Arms and the Man, by George Bernard Shaw, in 1985-86, as Count Bluntschli. This was around the time that a British actor of HB's own generation, Richard "The Good Life" Briers, had starred in the role in a Channel 4 production on British TV, and, once again, Kevin Kline was mirroring the role on Broadway. Another stage success for HB in the mid to late 1980's was in Twelve Angry Men, the famous courtroom drama, with HB as the Architect member of the jury, as played by Henry Fonda in the 1957 film.

In 1991, HB teamed up with his son, Christopher, for probably his most successful stage performance of his later career, and one of his key moments of the 1990's, in I Hate Hamlet. The play is about a young TV actor (played here by Christopher) who is offered a stage role as Hamlet but suddenly gets serious doubts about whether he's made a big career mistake. Up steps the ghost of legendary American stage actor and celebrated Broadway Hamlet incarnation John Barrymore (played here by HB) who then goads the young man into the role with a series of hilarious set-pieces and a sword fight which threatens to demolish the whole set. “[A] full-bodied and exuberant performance that transforms a skimpy script into a delightful evening,” is what veteran critic Thomas Quinn Curtiss had to tell the New York Times about HB's performance in Vienna.  1992 saw HB in a good old British bedroom farce, albeit again in German translation, as adulterous Cabinet Minister Richard Willey in Ray Cooney's Out of Order. British theatre goers may, for example, remember Donald Sinden in that role at the Shaftesbury Theatre.

HB's last stage performance came in 1996, in Jean-Paul Sartre's The Respectful Harlot, in Berlin. He was due to star in a touring performance of a play called You Again! in 2000, but collapsed from exhaustion during rehearsals in Düsseldorf.

A slightly lengthier article then, but hopefully another antidote to the rather dismissive tripe that you often read about Germany's most internationally successful actor of the last 70 years.